Wineries have always operated differently from traditional ecommerce, and for good reason.
The business model isn’t the same, wine clubs aren’t standard subscriptions. The tools wineries relied on weren’t built for wine, they were adapted from broader DTC models and retrofitted to fit a completely different type of business.
Because of that, wineries have had a natural hesitation to adopt AI.
The relationship is the core of the winery. That’s not something you want to automate away or reduce to a system.
However, AI has matured to a point where it’s no longer experimental. Used correctly, it’s a net benefit across the winery. Not as a replacement for the experience, but as support for it. It can make your team more effective, your content more consistent, and your customer interactions more thoughtful.
To break down where AI actually creates value, Awtomic Founder and CEO Emily Yuhas spoke with Shem Swerkes, Senior Director of Global Digital Innovation at Treasury Wine Estates, about how wineries should be using AI today.
Whether you’re just starting to explore AI or already using it in parts of your workflow, this guide is about where AI actually creates leverage for wineries in practical ways you can start using tomorrow.
How Wineries Should Actually Use AI
How to use AI
Turn one asset into multiple pieces of content
Start with a strong first draft in minutes
Build consistent posting systems
Train AI on your brand and reuse context
Systematize follow-ups and personalization
Build repeatable workflows that compound
Show up across reviews, content, and mentions
Scale output without losing your voice
How NOT to use AI
Create each piece of content from scratch
Spend hours getting past the blank page
Post inconsistently when there’s time
Re-explain your brand every time
Handle customer details manually
Redo the same work over and over
Rely only on your website for discovery
Trade quality for volume or vice versa
“A lot of people are going to approach AI as how they can save time or scale. And yeah, that’s where it’s strongest. But the reality is mediocre strategy with strong execution will beat big ideas with poor execution every time. AI just makes it easier to actually execute.”
— Shem Swerkes
AI Rewards Execution, Not Ideas
AI doesn’t replace strategy or creative thinking. It accelerates execution once you already know what you’re trying to accomplish. Use it to generate ideas, structure workflows, and remove friction so your team can spend more time refining the things that make your winery unique.
Turn one asset into ten pieces of content
“When you think about a winery, your history, your vineyard, your winemaking, that stuff doesn’t really change. That content is basically immortal. So instead of constantly trying to come up with something new, it’s how do you refresh it, cut it up differently, and use it across different channels without starting from scratch every time.”
— Shem Swerkes
Most wineries are sitting on years of content they’ve already paid for, the challenge becomes effective distribution over new content creation.
Take one asset and turn it into multiple outputs. A blog becomes a video, that video becomes social posts, those posts become an email. The goal is to create more output in less time from what already exists.
Use AI to get past the blank page
“The hardest part for most teams is just getting started. You’re staring at a blank page every day. AI takes you from that blank page to something you can actually work with, and that’s where it becomes really powerful.”
— Emily Yuhas
AI is a starting point, not an endpoint. Use it to brainstorm 50 ways to drive more tasting room visits, launch a digital campaign for a new wine release, or convert email subscribers into wine club members.
Not every idea will be great, but that’s not the point. The goal is to move from staring at a blank page to refining and iterating on ideas that actually fit your winery.
Build a repeatable posting system
“We talk a lot about creativity, but if you really look at it, most campaigns aren’t that unique. It’s the same ideas done slightly differently. The difference is who actually executes consistently.”
— Shem Swerkes
Consistency across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, and even YouTube will outperform a single high-production post every few weeks. Spend more time identifying repeatable content pillars for your winery like your values, vineyard history, tasting notes, food pairings, harvest updates, and the people behind the brand. Then use AI to turn one piece of content into 5-10 different assets so you can distribute consistently without constantly starting from scratch.
AI Works Best Behind the Scenes
The best use of AI in wine is rarely customer-facing. Treat it like a new member of your team by training it on your brand voice, customer experience, and operational workflows. The more context and direction you provide, the more useful and differentiated the output becomes.
Train AI on your brand like you would a new hire
“If you think about AI like a tool, you’re going to use it wrong. It’s more like a team member. If you hire someone, they don’t come in on day one knowing everything. You have to teach them your systems, your processes, how you think. AI is the same way. The more context you give it, the better it gets.”
— Emily Yuhas
If you feed AI generic input, you’ll get generic output. If you want differentiated results, give AI context. Constantly provide examples of your content, your tone, and your audience.
Tell it stories of what happened in the tasting room that day so it can learn and start to think like the most senior operator of your winery. Treat it like constant onboarding and mentoring, not a one-time interaction.
Use AI to upgrade your tasting room, not replace it
“The opportunity isn’t to replace the human experience. It’s to remove friction from your team’s job so they can focus on that human experience. How do you give them better information so they can create stronger interactions with the customer?”
— Shem Swerkes
Wine is still sold through relationships, hospitality, and experience. Customers still want recommendations from real people, conversations in the tasting room, and a sense of connection to the winery. The opportunity is letting AI handle the backend operational work so your team can spend more time focused on customers.
Use it to summarize customer preferences before visits, organize wine club notes, draft follow-up emails, or prepare staff with talking points before an event.
Systematize small personal touches that drive loyalty
“It doesn’t take much to create a meaningful experience. Remembering a birthday, something from a past visit, those small details go a really long way. That’s what people remember, and that’s what drives loyalty and retention.”
— Emily Yuhas
Retention isn’t built on big moments, it’s built on consistency. Small details, applied consistently, create loyalty over time.
AI Only Works After You Invest In It
AI is most effective when it becomes part of a repeatable system. Like onboarding a new employee, it improves through iteration, feedback, and structure over time. The wineries seeing the best results are using multiple tools, refining outputs, and building workflows that compound instead of restarting from zero every time.
Use AI for the first 90%, then finish the last 10%
“A lot of people expect to just open a tool and have it do everything. But you have to put the work in upfront. You’re building something that makes future work faster. If you try it once, don’t like the output, and quit, you’re missing the point.”
— Shem Swerkes
The real value of AI comes from building repeatable systems around the work your winery already does every year. Harvest updates, wine releases, allocation emails, club announcements, tasting event promotions, holiday campaigns, and food pairings all follow similar patterns.
Use AI to create the first 90% quickly, then step in to refine the final details, voice, and storytelling that make your winery unique. Over time, those workflows become faster, more consistent, and easier for your entire team to execute without starting from scratch every season.
Run outputs through a second AI to improve quality
“What I’ll do a lot of times is take the output from one model and have another one critique it. They’re actually better at evaluating each other’s work than doing their own.”
— Shem Swerkes
One of the easiest ways to improve output quality is to have different AI tools evaluate each other’s work instead of relying on a single result. Generate a wine club email in ChatGPT, then ask Claude to critique what feels generic, unclear, or off-brand. Have Gemini review a tasting room campaign and identify what’s missing or repetitive.
AI models are often better at spotting weaknesses in existing work than creating perfect output from scratch. This simple feedback loop leads to stronger ideas, sharper messaging, and fewer generic results.
Build workflows once so you don’t repeat work
“You’re building something that makes future work faster. It might take longer upfront, but that’s what creates efficiency later.”
— Emily Yuhas
Build prompts for tasting notes, templates for release emails, systems for social posts, and repeatable campaign structures for events and club pushes. The upfront setup takes more time initially, but it creates a system your winery can reuse every season instead of constantly reinventing the process.
Discovery and Brand are Changing at the Same Time
Search behavior is shifting quickly from traditional SEO toward conversational discovery through AI-powered search engines and assistants. That means clarity, usefulness, and authentic content matter more than volume or keyword stuffing. The wineries that win will be the ones creating content that genuinely connects with customers across websites, reviews, video, and social channels.
Write like someone is asking a question
“People don’t search the same way anymore. They’re talking to AI like it’s a person. And that AI might be looking at 20, 40, 60 different sources to generate an answer, and you have zero visibility into what those sources are.”
— Shem Swerkes
Search is becoming more conversational, which changes how wineries should create content. Instead of writing for keywords like “best Napa cabernet” or stuffing pages with SEO, GEO, or AEO phrases, write content that answers the actual questions customers are asking.
Show up beyond your website
“It’s not just your website anymore. It’s reviews, mentions, threads, content across the internet. AI is pulling from all of it.”
— Shem Swerkes
AI-powered search tools are pulling answers from reviews, blogs, videos, forums, and winery websites all at once. The wineries that win will be the ones creating clear, useful content that directly answers customer intent instead of trying to game search engines.
Focus on clarity and usefulness, not volume
“Everyone can generate content now. That’s not the advantage. The advantage is creating something that actually connects.”
— Emily Yuhas
More content isn’t always better. Focus on answering real questions, simplifying wine education, and helping customers feel more confident in what they’re buying. A straightforward article explaining the difference between two varietals or helping someone choose a wine for a dinner party will outperform dozens of pieces of generic AI-written content that say nothing meaningful.
Make the customer the hero, not the winery
“People aren’t buying because of structured data or even your brand story most of the time. They’re buying because of a connection or an experience. The shift is making the customer the hero.”
— Emily Yuhas
People buy wine emotionally, not logically. Talk about the moments, the people, the experience.
Most winery marketing focuses too heavily on the winery itself, but customers ultimately buy based on how the wine fits into their life and experiences. Talk about the dinner party it belongs at, the trip it reminds people of, or the kind of person who would enjoy it.
Start Here
AI is actually making the human side of wine even more important.
The wineries that benefit most from AI use it to remove operational friction, execute more consistently, and create more space for hospitality, storytelling, and customer relationships.
Start small. Pick one workflow, campaign, or piece of content.
From wine club management to AI-powered retention and customer experiences, Awtomic gives wineries the tools to grow while keeping the relationship at the center of the brand.